Interview: Sterling Ruby by Piero Golia
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Kaleidoscope Summer 2016 GAGOSIAN GALLERY Interview: Sterling Ruby Piero Golia Photography by Max Farago Piero Golia When I arrived in LA, you were already “Sterling.” So you should tell me the beginning of the story, the piece that I’m missing, and then we can start the conversation. Sterling Ruby Well, my family moved around a lot in my early childhood, but we finally wound up in Pennsylvania when I was about eight. By 1994, I had already done four years of art school there. It was a real “draw the bowls of fruit and the nude figure” kind of school, totally foundational and non-accredited. The program represented the “classics,” everything from the past: Gardner’s Art Through the Ages was our main textbook; the most recent person you would be someone like Philip Pearlstein. But in my last year, I started to look at contemporary art books. I don’t know why, but I remember our school, which had a very small library, acquiring Schimmel’s “Helter Skelter” book. It was so out of the ordinary. It didn’t look like anything I had seen or thought of or even been told existed. I had no knowledge of what was going on in New York at that point. I’d been to New York a few times, but to tell you the truth, the city intimidated me. After all, I grew up on a farm. So I finished up this four-year school, but it had no degree attached. A lot of the people I knew were starting to leave Pennsylvania, but as I said, I was still too intimidated to go to New York. Sarah Conaway, who lived in the same part of Pennsylvania, had moved to Chicago to do her graduate degree at UIC. So during that last year in Pennsylvania, I started going to Chicago fairly regularly, and eventually decided to move there. PG What years are we talking here? SR Mid-‘90s to late ‘90s. So I wound up going to Chicago for a number of years to finish up my undergraduate degree at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. That’s basically where I met all of my art friends. I tried to have a studio and exhibit in Chicago, but to be quite honest, it was a downhill battle for me. Around that time, I wound up buying a copy of that Schimmel book. That catalog made it seem like there was something pathological coming from California that made more sense for me. I had never been there, I really didn’t know what it was like, but I knew I did not want to go to New York. So I got into Art Center and moved out here blindly, not knowing what to expect. But once I got here, I started to meet everybody—Mike Kelley, Liz Larner, Richard Hawkins, Ann Goldstein, Chris Williams, Lawrence Rickles, Diana Thater, all of them. And then later on, I met Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins and Barbara Krueger. LA just made sense to me. PG Do you think LA’s still that city? SR Speaking specifically from a student’s perspective, I don’t think it is quite the same anymore. I think it’s much different than it was in the early 2000s, and I think it was much different then than it was in the 1990s. There was such a trajectory with the schools: at that time, mid-‘90s to 2000s, everybody was still teaching. Chris Burden and Nancy Rubins were at UCLA, Mike Kelley and Liz Larner were at Art Center. There were still people teaching at CalArts, and USC was just starting to get their program together. LA still had a very strong teacher-student ratio. Also, compared to anywhere else in America, LA had a generational history of working artists teaching, and the students would graduate, become working artists and then teach, then that generation of students would graduate and then teach. So you could look at this lineage between John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Mike Kelley, Jason Rhodes, Sharon Lockhart—I mean, all of those artists were students of someone at one point in time, and then they became teachers. But I don’t think it’s that way anymore. PG No, nobody wants to starve anymore! It’s funny, because I always considered you the first LA artist who wasn’t jaded. For example, when I first arrived here and was looking for those gods—Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, Chris Burden—I had this naïve idea about arriving at this Olympus. But then I realized that these guys were really on the street, available for everybody. None of them had this status as an artist; even now, people don’t talk about Paul like he’s a Master—they just say, “Oh, that’s weird.” But I considered you the first artist in LA who had his own consciousness, and who understood the role of the artist as more than just a privilege. Today, you have all of these kids who come here because they have seen someone like Sterling Ruby, and they believe that if you come to LA, that’s what you’re going to get. It’s a package. But you always saw it as a social duty, a role with real and lasting implications. SR During the last year that Mike taught at Art Center, we were pretty close. I was his teaching assistant, and he was still going out—like, if a student had a party, he’d go to the party. But that last year, something changed for him, and I started to see him get more paranoid about his success. He started to have more anxiety about going out in public. I was with him on a number of occasions where he’d be out in public, and someone would come up to him and start criticizing him, or start implicating him as having done something—stealing craft from feminist history, or whatever else. I would be out with him, and someone would just come up and start shit with him. That last year, we’d go out alone, like to a bar in Eagle Rock or something, and I could tell he was starting to think about his success as an artist in a different way. He still held the obligation for the people that were loyal to him and that he was friends with, but he was very anxious about the idea of opening himself up to too many people, and to the public perception of what the LA art scene was starting to become. I’d just come from this small school in Pennsylvania, and we’d never talked about being an artist as a career, or about galleries—you’d talk about having a job illustrating for a wildlife catalog, or you might illustrate for a greeting card company, but there was never any discussion of becoming a working artist. I suppose there was really no chance of that happening in Pennsylvania. And then Chicago had such a DIY mentality, there was no structure to it. The artists did everything on their own—most of the shows that we did were in garages or apartments. There were a couple of galleries in Chicago, but for the most part I had no chance whatsoever of showing with any of them. LA was different: it had a system. I’m sure New York did too, but LA had this infrastructure of galleries and working artists. I didn’t automatically think that I was bound to be an exhibiting artist when I moved to LA. I still had the baggage of Pennyslvania and Chicago with me. It wasn’t until later, when Mike or Chris would explain things to me in depth, that I learned about galleries, sales, museums and curators. Those two were the ones who opened my eyes to the notion that being an artist has responsibilities beyond just making art. PG It’s funny: when you look at Chris’ work, you imagine him as somebody living a parallel reality. But then I met him and realized that no, he was completely aware and sentient. He’d remember who you were and know what you’re doing. He was incredibly conscious. In LA, the recognition of other artists is what makes your name. SR Yes. Strangely enough, the perception of Chris and Nancy is that they were outsiders. When you looked at most of those artists in “Helter Skelter,” you had the sense that they were all pathologically insane. But then when you really got to know them, at least from my perspective, artists like Chris and Nancy or Mike and Emi [Fontana] became almost like parental figures. They were very logical. They gave me the best advice and helped me navigate what was to come. PG They represent this LA thing: two young artists who fall in love and gain their fame in the street. But it’s not like that anymore. Now, I feel like people in LA reveal too much of the game, you know? Art is not something you can set rules for, and yet everyone here seems to know what they are, and they follow them. SR Right. The social dynamic of being an artist has definitely changed for me. I have a hard time going to openings, or to artist parties or dinners now. PG I’m somebody who loves people, I love the art, but I can see the difference. Sometimes I think you get to the point where you realize, this isn’t really a party, this is an event.